I got my accreditation from the Society for the Promotion of Integrated Thought Leadership in the mail yesterday. How? That’s a very good question and, as a thought leader, it is my solemn duty to answer as condescendingly as possible.

There are two questions you need to answer before you begin the rigorous process of becoming a Fully Accredited Thought Leader: Read More

I was referred to an article the other day titled ‘31 awesome ways to improve your fitness’. Number one was “Make your workout as awesome as you can.”

There was no elaboration.

I didn’t get past number 4.

What’s that got to do with the price of milk?

Well, what I’m referring to above is a form of content. Exceptionally bad content. But that’s just one example. What is content in a more general sense? For the answer to that question, I went to one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject: me.… Read the rest

I don’t know much about fashion, but I know what I like. And I like what I saw in a 45 year old ad for King Gee Permanent Press Tropical Shorts (posted by the brilliant Facebook page, Lost Melbourne).

Of course, 1970 was a different time. I was minus 12 years old back then, so my memory of the era is a bit sketchy, but the ad tells us this was a time when 60 year-old men in exposed knee-high white socks consulted blueprints while standing. A time when the word “Bermuda” meant something so much more than “tax haven”. A time when some hastily scribbled red texta sufficed as the background for a print advertisement.

It was a time that we should look back on with nostalgic envy.… Read the rest

Do you want to know what annoys me about the ‘inspirational’ memes and quotes that do the rounds on Facebook and LinkedIn? Well, their preposterous oversimplification of the human condition, obviously. But also their ubiquity.

There are so many and they seem to be everywhere, turning social media feeds into ultra-efficient production lines of trite platitudes.… Read the rest

I’m writing to you because I feel a great injustice is being perpetrated against you by my compatriots.

You see, I live in Australia. As you now well know, in 1996 the Prime Minister of Australia responded to a massacre in which a man murdered 35 people using semi-automatic weapons by implementing the National Firearms Agreement, which broadly restricted citizens’ use of a particular range of guns. As you also know, whenever someone goes on a gun rampage in the United States, people begin to discuss gun control and point to Australia as a radiant example of the good that can come of a government depriving the public of a right to bear certain arms.

Indeed, most Australians are extremely proud of the fact our country hasn’t had a case of gun-related multiple murder since the Agreement was introduced. Some Australians even mock the United States, and your organisation particularly, for your intransigent attitude and your preoccupation with the Second Amendment to your Constitution.

They use appalling terms like “psychotically and sickeningly deranged loons”, “miscreant black-hats of yesteryear”, “exemplars of deluded God-fearing America”, “pump action degenerates”, “constitutional terrorists and derelicts who use propaganda to hold a country hostage via a corrupt political system”, “trigger-happy shit pouches”, “powder-stick clutching codgers”, “belligerent dickbiscuits”, “arsey cunt-wibbles”, “a mass indistinguishable from the contents of a one year old’s nappy after consumption of half a kilo of sultanas”, “toxic, turgid cloacas of the apocalypse”, “suburban frontiersmen open carrying in McDonalds”, “anal swabs from the last leper in hell”, “obdurate brittledicks”, “a group of self-proclaimed realists obsessed with an imaginary deity and 220 year-old laws”, “antiquated redcoat-fighting wannabes”, “hooting, honking sociopaths”, “gun rooting fanatics”, “a giant group of old men grasping at their last vestiges of virility”, “shamelessly insensitive arse spores”, “the dregs of humanity, hiding their sexual repression behind camouflage and standard issue goatees”, “the rotting barnacles of humanity”, “shitcunts” and so on and so forth.… Read the rest

Murphy’s Law states that “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong” but there are hundreds of sub-laws and corollaries that sit underneath it. Murphy’s Constant, for example, says “Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value”.

I had one of those abject moments of deflation last year. You know the ones: they came just after you realise a piece of your work – or the concept behind it – which you’d considered original in the most pristine sense, has been done before?

OK, to be fair “in the most pristine sense” is a bit of an exaggeration. I knew that mocking and denouncing corporate malarkey was, by the rules of human nature, almost as old as corporate malarkey itself. But I thought everyone was off in their own corners ridiculing and railing against their own bug-bears: the ubiquity and omnipotence of “brand”, the impenetrability of “agile”, the absurdity of the tiny list of words that go into most corporate mission statements…

They’re small and fluffy and sometimes even comforting to be around (don’t tell me you haven’t ever wished you could stroke a little grey euphemism’s ears). For this reason, people underestimate them and the next thing they know they’ve spread with astounding speed and they’re everywhere.

Euphemisms are also very good at mutating. Just when you think you’ve become immune to one, a new strain emerges.

If you follow Haught on Facebook, you’ll be intimately familiar with the AAA-class weirdo and anti-political correctness campaigner, Pat Raw. Or you might not be at all. That’s how Facebook works these days.

Pat rides the 86 Tram from somewhere up beyond Preston into the city each morning and on many occasions, until recently, I rode it with him. Read More